In Mac OS X Lion, Apple reversed the scrolling direction. “Natural Scrolling” means that you are now moving the content instead of the scroll bar.

It took my brain a week to get used to it and now it completely makes sense to my muscle memory. In fact, on my Windows PC at work, my brain went nuts trying to go back to the old way. I dusted off the AutoHotkey scripting environment and wrote a script that reverses scrolling direction.

Objective-C categories are cool. They allow you do something that you can’t do in most compiled languages: add new methods to existing classes. You can even add methods to classes that you didn’t write.

Suppose you wrote some code to translate an ordinary string, like “Hello, perhaps I could enjoy a bit of your delicious sandwich over there?” to LOLcat speak, like “I can has cheezburger?”

I believe there is a place for this is the world of technology. I think there is a need for a Software Tailor. For instance, you have a text editor that works well but could use just a few changes to make it work perfectly for you. You take it to the Software Tailor and they do that for you. Or perhaps you go to one to build the perfect task management app to fit your specific working style. In my mind, many who program are crafts people and I think there is a growing opportunity and need for such a service by people with these skills.

As a software developer, I use techniques similar to this often. I absolutely love the term Software Tailor.

And that’s why the world needs something like Codecademy. It makes this type of learning accessible to just about anyone. It’s also a hell of a lot cheaper (free) than going back to school. And, to be honest, it’s just a much better way to learn. It’s not just about the taking the teaching and moving it online, it’s about making the learning process compelling.

They have a great hook. When you arrive on the site, you are asked to type your name in quotes. And that completes the first step of a Javascript tutorial.